As
an educator in Colorado through the 70s, 80s and 90s, I watched academic
standards and expectations drop like a brick in a bucket of water, like
a jet fighter plane auguring into the ground, like water cascading over
Niagara Falls. As if guided by an invisible hand nationwide, administrators
forced teachers to dumb down the academic requirements. Teachers passed
kids to the next grade level whether those children performed or not.

As
they failed to cement their educational foundations with the basics—the
gaps in their math, science, reading and English skills—created
terrible frustrations in their personal lives. When their irritation
levels became too great, they ‘gave up’ their pursuit of
minimal levels of educational achievement. Often, while being ‘pushed’
up through grade levels, they acted out their annoyances with disrespect
for teachers as they became malcontents, troublemakers or shut down
all together to cope with their growing lack of self-esteem and failures.

This
year, Paul Robeson High School in Chicago, Illinois featured 115 pregnant
girls. That equals not only115 dumb girls, but 115 dumb boys, which
will beget 115 more troubled babies facing horrific futures on all counts.
Thus, millions drop out or ‘graduate’ functionally illiterate,
i.e., cannot think critically, read at a fifth grade level or balance
a check book.

To
completely upend and degrade the educational systems of America, the
late U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, in 1965, passed a bill to inject 1.2
to 1.5 million immigrants into the equation annually. They arrived with
dozens of languages, cultural bias against education and hostility toward
learning.

Forty
years later, and 100 million people added to the United States from
disparate cultures around the world, educational systems around America
grind on in total chaos. With a 600,000 Middle Eastern immigrant load
in Detroit, Michigan, as reported by NBC’s Brian Williams, “…76
percent of high school students in Detroit schools flunked out this
June…other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston feature
similar dropout rates from 50 to 60 percent…each year 1.2 million
teens hit the streets illiterate.”

That
leads up to the distressing fact that 1 in 7 Americans remains functionally
illiterate:

Illiteracy
Statistics

•
42 million American adults can't read at all; 50 million are unable
to read at a higher level that is expected of a fourth grader. • The number of adults that are classified as
functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year. • 20 percent of high school seniors can be classified
as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate. Source:
National Right to Read Foundation

Where
Illiteracy Leads

•
70 percent of prisoners in state and federal systems can be classified
as illiterate. • 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate as
functionally or marginally illiterate. • 43 percent of those whose literacy skills are
lowest live in poverty. Source: National Institute for Literacy

Yet,
with those disturbing figures, our U.S. Congress imports an added 2.5
million legal and illegal immigrants into this country every year. That
equals over 200,000 every 30 days. Their kids overwhelm our schools.
They subvert education for our own children. The immigrants themselves
face daunting challenges as to culture, language and jobs.

In
Denver, we suffer 85 languages and a 67 percent Denver Public Schools
flunkout rate as reported by the Rocky Mountain News in a story “What
Happened?” Ironically, the ‘Rocky’ bankrupted in 2008
because not enough people could read! The same holds true for dozens
of cities across our country.

Becoming
a nation of dummies in the 21st century

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What
happens when somebody cannot read, write or perform simple math? If
they cannot obtain a labor job, they pursue crime, drugs, alcohol, welfare,
homelessness and worse. Such uneducated women usually become pregnant
and their children become abused, live in poverty and become wards of
the state. Over 13.4 million American children live below the poverty
line according to Katie Couric in a recent telecast. An astounding 35
million Americans subsist on food stamps.

What
happens when young adult women fail their educational pursuits? I’ll
use one state to show you the underbelly of what’s happening to
the United States:

Nearly
nine of every 10 teen-agers who gave birth in Massachusetts were unmarried,
the highest percentage of out-of-wedlock teen-age births of any state
in the nation. According to the most recent data available from the
National Center for Health Statistics, 86 percent of the 7,018 mothers
under age 20 who gave birth in this state two years ago were not married.
The percentage was higher in Boston, hitting 92 percent. In Springfield,
90 percent of teen-age mothers were unmarried. "It is staggeringly
high," said state Health and Human Services Secretary Charles D.
Baker Jr. Additionally, it is estimated that 80 percent of unwed teen
mothers end up welfare.

In
a penetrating article, Jared Taylor, “The Silent Catastrophe”
October 12 2009, “One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining
quality of the American work force. The Census Bureau tells us that
if immigration continues at its current rate of nearly two million people
a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population
in just 14 years—in 2023—and will become a minority of the
working population just 16 years later. The greatest increase will be
in Hispanics,
who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks,
doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school,
and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning
to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced
by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the
last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could
go into a tailspin.”

“We
have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American
tragedy,” says
Irwin Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service.
He warns that our increasingly non-white and immigrant workforce threatens
not only our standard of living, but the very survival of republican
government based on an informed middle class.

“Here
are some
of the facts,” said Taylor. “In 2007, 93.5 percent of
white and 93.1 percent of Asian 18- to 24-year-olds had graduated from
high school. The figures for blacks and Hispanics were 88.8 percent
and 72.7 percent, meaning that Hispanics were more than four times more
likely than whites and 2.4 times more likely than blacks to have failed
to graduate from high school.”

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Painfully,
as witnessed in Detroit, so many poor people shoplifted from grocery
stores and retail merchants that they bankrupted or vacated the inner
city. The poor cannot find a place to buy their groceries even with
food stamps. On a national scale, shoplifters hoist $35 million a day
in goods from retail stores. We all pay for that massive theft. Think
of the implications of adding 70 million more immigrants to our cities
across America.

John
Wayne said, “Life is tough, but it’s even tougher if you’re
stupid!”

Part
2: Consequences from growing illiterate numbers

Listen
to Frosty Wooldridge on Wednesdays as he interviews
top national leaders on his radio show "Connecting the Dots"
at www.themicroeffect.com
at 6:00 PM Mountain Time. Adjust tuning in to your time zone.

Frosty
Wooldridge possesses a unique view of the world, cultures and families
in that he has bicycled around the globe 100,000 miles, on six continents
and six times across the United States in the past 30 years. His published
books include: "HANDBOOK FOR TOURING BICYCLISTS" ; �STRIKE THREE! TAKE
YOUR BASE�; �IMMIGRATION�S UNARMED INVASION: DEADLY CONSEQUENCES�; �MOTORCYCLE
ADVENTURE TO ALASKA: INTO THE WIND�A TEEN NOVEL�; �BICYCLING AROUND THE
WORLD: TIRE TRACKS FOR YOUR IMAGINATION�; �AN EXTREME ENCOUNTER: ANTARCTICA.�
His next book: �TILTING THE STATUE OF LIBERTY INTO A SWAMP.� He lives
in Denver, Colorado.

Painfully,
as witnessed in Detroit, so many poor people shoplifted from grocery stores
and retail merchants that they bankrupted or vacated the inner city. The
poor cannot find a place to buy their groceries even with food stamps.